


The Most Powerful Thing

by 2babyturtles



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Copper - Freeform, Crime Fighting, Crimes & Criminals, DS, Detective, F/M, Gen, Love, Murder, Murderer, Mutual Pining, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Police, Stalking, Tags May Change, Unconditional Love, chase - Freeform, cop, di
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-05 01:50:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12784350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2babyturtles/pseuds/2babyturtles
Summary: They both know it, but they don't know what to do with it. Alice wants to see the world and John wants to see the world become a better place. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that can happen when they're together. But all they really want is to be together. Finding a way to make that work seems impossible now but the future holds endless possibilities.





	1. Prologue: I Always Do

He hardly hesitates—just a breath really—but she knows what it means. Offering a sad smile and warm eyes, she presses the palm of one pale hand against his dark skin. She can’t help wondering if she’ll have another opportunity to get this close, and she hesitates—just a breath—before pulling away.

“Alice, I—“ he cuts himself off, knowing he doesn’t actually have anything to say to make it better.

“Someday, you’re going to make someone very happy, John,” she replies sincerely, trying to keep the bitterness in her chest from leaking into her voice. “But I have the saddest feeling that you’re never going to be.”

He closes his eyes, his lips still slightly parted, and sighs. “I seem to be good at making sure I’m unhappy, don’t I?” he chuckles humorlessly. There’s hurt in his past and it comes out in the way his words curl sharply.

“You know how to find me,” Alice finally manages, tucking her hands in her pockets and strolling past the detective and deciding firmly not to look back.

“No I don’t,” he shouts, quickly closing the distance between them with his low, rumbling voice.

Turning so she’s walking backwards and fixing him with a devilish grin, she speaks much more gently. “Exactly! I’ll find you, John. I always do.” That smile. That lovely, lovely smile. It almost makes it worth it that she’s already broken her own promise: don’t look back.


	2. Who Is She Then?

John isn’t sure whether his patience has run out or whether everyone else in the room has suddenly become more annoying. Between the clicking of Benny’s pen and Justin’s chair squeaking as he moves, the environment is hardly a soothing one. His priorities are split between managing the ache that’s forming behind his left eye and ignoring the clock looming above him on the wall. He’s off soon and _she_ knows it.

Not that he really keeps regular hours, and, of all people, Alice Morgan would know the precise time at which he left work, but he can’t help…hoping? He tries to squash the feeling as Schenk approaches with a stack of documents.

“What’ve you got for me, Guv?” he asks, interrupting the man who was clearly not intending to approach him.

Schenk raises one caterpillar-like eyebrow and examines John through his small spectacles. “I was going to have DS Devonshire look at these, see if there’s any connection,” he responds, holding up the documents and revealing that each one is an individual cold case.

“I can take care of that,” John says, hoping he sounds cheerful. Apparently he does because now others are staring at him, confused.

“Are you alright?” Justin asks, his voice thick with concern. “You look angry but you sound happy.”

Sighing and rubbing one hand down his face, John hesitates a moment before responding. “I’m fine,” he finally decides. “Honestly, I just don’t want to go home.”

Schenk’s eyes narrow as if he can’t decide whether this information makes John a great employee or a liability. Moving slowly, he offers the documents to John but pulls them back when the man reaches for them. “Only if DS Ripley stays with you to finish them,” he decides, gesturing with his head at the younger man.

John grumbles another sigh but looks pleadingly at Justin. Some part of him feels guilty for asking so much of a man who probably has better things to do than pore over hopeless cases, but he’s mostly just desperate at this point. He feels worse when Justin agrees wholeheartedly, and finally worst when he realizes he’s not surprised.

“Thanks, Justin,” John replies, ignoring Schenk’s exaggerated sigh as he deposits the stack of documents on DS Ripley’s desk. “I’ll get you a beer tonight.”

“ _After_ you’re done, please,” Schenk calls as he returns to his office, no doubt to hide from any other such confrontation for now.

Justin smiles and John winks at him behind Schenk’s back, chuckling softly. “I actually have some news,” Justin admits after a moment. A blush rises from beneath his stiff white collar and he tugs on his tie as if it’s suddenly too tight. “Good news,” he adds, noting John’s concerned expression.

Smirking, John nods. “Well then I’ll buy you two beers,” he replies. Justin smiles and turns back to his desk, pulling his phone out to send a text before he resumes whatever menial work he’d been doing on the computer.

Benny smirks, too, enjoying the exchange, and nods when he catches John’s eyes, effectively calling him over. John glances back at Justin for a moment and raises his eyebrows curiously when Benny shakes his head. Their desks certainly aren’t far enough apart that DS Ripley won’t hear their conversation, so it can’t be anything sensitive. Intrigued, John pushes himself out of his own chair and moves to Benny stand beside Benny, taking care to place himself opposite Justin.

“What is it?” he asks quietly, peering at the computer screen and shaking his head when he realizes it’s nothing special. He frowns, wondering what the tech guru has in mind.

“I have decided,” Benny begins with mock formalness, “that it is time you knew that I happen to know you have news, too.” He offers a smile but it fades when he sees the confused look on John’s face.

“Wait, you’ve decided what?”

“I know that you’re seeing someone again,” Benny repeats, exasperated. His tone makes it clear that he thinks this is a surprise rather than a secret.

John wants to straighten to his full height and leave the room, but a measure of caution stays him and he looks more sternly at Benny. “What do you mean?” he asks again. He’s generally adept at looking and sounding precisely how he wants to, a helpful trick for convincing a murder that he empathizes with them—and maybe he does--, but Benny knows him too well and the feigned confusion doesn’t fool him.

“So it _is_ a secret then,” he responds, forming it like a question, although his eyes pull away and he doesn’t wait for an answer. “In which case, my good friend, pretend I said nothing.”

Somewhere in the office, someone’s phone chimes 5:00pm and John cringes as his coworkers begin packing their items. Benny taps the side of his nose, promising his secrecy, and leaves smoothly, following the wave of men and women until John is left with only Justin and Schenk. It’s hard to say which of the three of them is the least enthusiastic.

“I was expecting DS Devonshire to get a good head start on these. Obviously with cold cases there’s only so much that can be done. But I do expect progress tonight, men,” Schenk instructs, somehow sounding as kind as he does firm.

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that, sir,” Justin responds, looking back and forth from John to Schenk with a half-hearted smile. “You’ve got the best on it.” He smirks a bit, daring one of them to ask whether he means John or himself, until Schenk finally cracks a grin.

“Fine,” he decides. “But don’t get into any trouble.” He leaves this last comment more pointedly at John and dips his head as he, too, leaves the office.

John lets his eyes linger heavily on the stack of documents, sitting on the edge of DS Ripley’s desk like so many waiting rejection notices, before glancing up at his friend and colleague. “You didn’t have to stay,” he murmurs, not believing it even as it comes out of his mouth.

Justin splits the stack and hands the top half to John. His eyebrows are flat and his expression is serious. “Of course I did,” he responds sincerely. Guilt settles in John’s stomach and he presses his lips together, nodding gratefully. “How should we do this, then, guv?”

Pausing for just a moment to consider the stack and the space they have to work with, John moves the chairs out of the way between his desk and the next one, opening a space on the floor. “We have to find something to start with,” he mutters, more to himself than anything. “What are the first things they check?”

“Age of the victim, look of the victim, uh…cause of death,” Justin provides, insisting as he always does that he be included in this process.

John’s eyes flash gratefully but he forgets to look up and he doubts Justin sees the expression, and it’s gone before he reconsiders. “Let’s sort them by when they happened and by where, see if we can get a timeline and a map first,” he decides. He looks down at the first case in his hand and has to remind himself to breathe when a pale redheaded woman looks back at him from the page. _Not Alice._ He scans the document for the crime’s location and quickly starts the _London_ stack in the middle of the space.

Justin nods grimly and they set to work, only the sound of the ticking clock and shuffling papers keeping them company. John is grateful for the silence but he can’t help wondering whether it’s really any better than going home would’ve been. If Alice was going to call, she would have by now anyway. There’s hardly any point in pushing himself to tasks that anyone in the office could do and losing sleep over work that doesn’t need him when it doesn’t provide any escape anyway.

“Who is she then?” Justin finally asks, breaking the relative silence.

John’s stomach twists and he wonders whether he’s been caught somehow or whether Benny didn’t keep his mouth quite as tightly shut as he said he would. “Who is who?” he asks, hoping to find that Justin is asking about a victim on one of their pages or something.

“I’ve only ever seen you like this when things weren’t going well with Zoe,” Justin admits, checking John’s reaction out the corner of his eye. When the detective doesn’t react, he continues. “But you also look happier and…I dunno.”

The pervading quiet resumes and John isn’t sure how to break it properly. He isn’t quite ready to talk about it—he’s not even sure what to say—but he doesn’t want to leave Justin out, either. If he was going to talk to anyone, it’d be him. It’s been two months since Alice left and he’s hardly any better off than he was that very first day.

He opens his mouth to say something but a sharp knock on the glass window interrupts him. Both men glance up and their eyes widen to find a pale woman dressed all in black, red-hair streaming behind her, hanging from a harness outside the window. “Let me in,” she mouths, pointing to the lock on the inside of the window.

Without a second thought, John leaps forward to pull Alice Morgan inside the office. Behind him, Justin’s face has twisted into a look of shock and concern, and he makes a point of covering anything particularly sensitive before the woman gets close enough to see it.

“Are you mad?” Justin asks, not sure which of the two he’s asking. No one answers and he wonders whether he should be asking himself.

“What’re you doing here?” John asks, supporting Alice as she takes the first of several wobbly steps across the floor. Concern bubbles across his expression and his eyes narrow with worry.

“I found you,” she whispers softly. Her eyes are glistening and there’s a light sheen of sweat across her face, despite the chill that’s crept in from the outside with her. Without another word, she leans forward and vomits on the carpet before slumping into unconsciousness. John looks like he’s holding a small doll in his arms and Justin can’t help considering that perhaps he really has gone mad. Alice’s face looks softer when she’s not awake and the frantic care in John’s eyes suddenly makes sense to Justin, who decides in that moment that his own news might not be worth sharing after all.


	3. Talk Plainly, Alice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the change from T to M!!

There’s something distinctly… _unhealthy…_ about the way John peers into the woman’s face, and Justin isn’t sure whether it’s the longing or the sense of defeat that worries him. He recognizes the woman from his first case with John, but somehow that seems less important than anything else as the detective inspector lowers her body to the ground and checks her vital signs.

“Her heart is racing,” John murmurs, checking the pulse in her wrist while he listens to her breathing.

“Well she just lowered herself in through a window, I can’t imagine I’d be too calm after that either,” Justin responds. His voice comes out somewhere between amused and disbelieving and he straightens his position to regain some sense of control over himself.

“Yeah, but _you_ are not Alice Morgan,” John grumbles, moving now to check for obvious signs of violence on Alice’s body.

Each of John’s motions is swift and graceful, characteristic of the detective as a whole. But there’s something familiar about the way he engages with the woman’s body that makes Justin wonder how much of it he’s seen before. Not sure what to do with himself, Justin moves to lean against the nearest desk.

“What can I do, guv?” he asks, spreading his hands helplessly.

John looks up and rewards him with a dark smile. “If I only knew,” he responds, eyes dancing with something Justin can’t identify. “If you do happen to find a way to ensure that I don’t keep sabotaging myself, though, do let me know.”

Somehow the laughter in John’s voice doesn’t seem out of place, despite everything else that’s happening. Cued by the semblance of normalcy in that response, Justin shifts again to remove his blazer and settle back into the task of sorting the cold case files. He is nearly a third through the stack before he hears the woman stirring.

“John,” she breathes. Her voice is low and sultry and Justin is entirely sure he’s not meant to hear it sound like that. His eyes flash nervously but John isn’t looking when he glances at them.

“What the bloody hell, Alice? What’re you doing here?” John asks, helping the woman into a seated position.

“I might ask you the same thing,” she responds, cocking an eyebrow. A smile threatens her expression but she seems to be in pain and the face falters.

“Oh really? I work here, need I remind you. You’re breaking into a police department.”

“Ah, yes, but you like me too much to arrest me for it.” Moving suddenly, she lifts her ankle and reaches one pale hand for her boot where she retrieves a knife.

The shining metal glints dangerously and she smirks for a moment, apparently pleased to have been so close and so dangerous, before throwing it several feet away. Landing with a thud, the weapon clearly weighs more than it looks like it would. Justin swallows hard, hand twitching instinctively towards his own holster, and grimaces when he finds himself unarmed.

“No worries, DS Ripley,” Alice calls, adding a mocking tone to his name as she says it. “I don’t plan on harming either of you. I came to help you.”

“By providing an easy arrest?” Justin responds before he can catch himself. He’s not angry…not really. But he is certainly frustrated, and it leaks out in the stiff way he lifts his voice into a question and his eyebrows into a facsimile of one.

“Why, yes, in fact. You are so _astute,_ DS Ripley.” Returning to a more comfortable reclining position, Alice reaches her arms up over her head and stretches casually.

John takes the opportunity to return to his feet and suddenly seems like a very large presence in the room. With the night sky sauntering behind him through the window, he seems to be more a part of London itself than this room. His eyes flash, moving from Alice to Justin and back.

“Talk plainly, Alice, we don’t have all night,” he nearly growls.

Something like embarrassment plays across his face and Justin wonders whether he’d expected a more intimate—or at least more affectionate—reunion with the psychopath.

“Actually you do,” she responds, moving to stand beside him despite her contradiction. “I do believe you intended to stay here and dig through hopeless cases all night. I assure you, my presence is wildly more interesting.”

“It’s not your presence we’re concerned with, is it?” Justin adds, crossing his arms as he, too, stands. “It’s the reason for it. Why are you here?”

For a moment, John almost looks like he might interrupt. Apparently thinking better of it, he locks his jaw against whatever words were forming and stares with tight eyes at the redhead between them. Alice seems to enjoy the attention and a smile spreads slowly across her face as she flips her hair over her shoulder and cocks one hip.

“I’m here because in,” she looks at her wrist as if to check a watch but there’s no timepiece there, “anytime now, someone is going to break into the police department.”

John and Justin are silent for a moment, almost as if they’re internally dueling over which of them will respond to the statement. “Yes,” John finally manages, crossing his arms as well. “You.”

Alice waves a hand dismissively, rolling a shoulder nonchalantly. “Please, I wouldn’t come here to warn you about myself. No, this trespasser will have weapons.”

“You did have a weapon,” Justin responds this time, shaking his head in disbelief.

This time, Alice allows a bit of irritation to color her features, and she scowls at Justin. However, she carefully maintains her casual posture and doesn’t shift when she answers him, “Not me, moron. This freak will have a knife.”

John scoffs, turning away from the woman and dropping his arms. Tracking him with her eyes, Alice straightens to a more ready stance and watches him pleadingly. He opens his mouth to say something but is interrupted again, this time by the sound of heavy foot falls on the steps and the unmistakable sound of a knife being sharpened on a rod.

“Anybody home?” a man’s voice, a piercing falsetto tone mocking that of a child, calls lithely up the stairs. “I thought I heard people talking. I just wanted a glass of water.”

“I told you,” Alice hisses, crouching and lunging for her knife as John and Justin move for their guns. “He’s a fucking freak.”


End file.
